.
Me voici devant tous un homme plein de sens
Connaissant la vie et de la mort ce qu’un vivant peut connaître
Ayant éprouvé les douleurs et les joies de l’amour
Ayant su quelquefois imposer ses idées
Connaissant plusieurs langages
Ayant pas mal voyagé
Ayant vu la guerre dans l’Artillerie et l’lnfanterie
Blessé à la tête trépané sous le chloroforme
Ayant perdu ses meilleurs amis dans l’effroyable lutte
Je sais d’ancien et de nouveau autant qu’un homme seul pourrait des deux savoirYou see before you a man in his right mind
Worldly-wise and with access to death
Having tested the sorrow of love and its ecstasies
Having sometimes even astonished the professors
Good with languages
Having travelled a great deal
Having seen battle in the Artillery and the Infantry
Wounded in the head trepanned under chloroform
Having lost my best friends in the butchery
As much of antiquity and modernity as can be known I know
Guillaume Apollinaire, “La jolie rousse” (The Pretty Redhead), line 1; p. 133.
Guillaume Apollinaire. Born Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki in 1880. Try saying that three times fast. He didn’t. Changed it to something French, something that rolled off the tongue, something that fit.
Poet. Playwright. Art critic. He was there, in the middle of it all. Paris, early 1900s. Knew Picasso, Gertrude Stein, all of them. He championed Cubism when people thought it was garbage. Defended the avant-garde. Coined the term “surrealism.” He saw where art was going before anyone else did.
His poetry broke rules. Threw out punctuation, experimented with form, made shapes on the page, calligrammes, he called them. Words arranged as pictures. Nobody was doing that.
Then World War I happens. He volunteers. Fights for France even though he wasn’t born French. 1916: shrapnel to the head. He survives the wound, barely.
November 9th, 1918. Two days before the Armistice. Two goddamn days before the war ends. Spanish flu kills him. Thirty-eight years old.
He almost made it. Almost saw the end of the war he volunteered for, almost saw the peace, almost got to keep writing.
Almost.
Apollinaire made something. Then he was gone.
Shot on infrared film in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Signed Limited Edition 11” x17” print of 10; stamped on verso. Professional black & white printing on Hahnemühle fibre-based Matt paper.